


in search of all things beautiful

by goingmywaydoll



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Insomnia, Introspection, Lots of Gay Thoughts and Processing, M/M, Patrick-centric, Pre-Canon, basically 9k of me projecting onto patrick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-02 15:19:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19201561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goingmywaydoll/pseuds/goingmywaydoll
Summary: Patrick spends most of his life living in the conditional tense. And then he meets David and he stops saying should so much and starts sleeping a lot more.Alternatively, a lot of words about Patrick, sleep, and finding peace.





	in search of all things beautiful

**Author's Note:**

> phew.
> 
> this one was a personal one for me. i did a lot of processing through this fic, and a lot of it did not show up in the final draft for a lot of reasons. but. i am very happy with where it ended up. patrick as a character means a lot to me and i'll be grateful to dan levy for offering me this opportunity to love myself and my gayness through his characters in a way i didn't know i needed.

Before Patrick turned five and after he learned how to walk, after he graduated from a crib and into a big kid bed, he would tiptoe down the hall and into his parent’s room at three am. He would tap his mom on the shoulder and without opening her eyes, she would lift the blanket and he would wordlessly tuck himself into her side. Every morning his dad would pretend to be surprised to find him in their bed; he did it every night until at age five he decided he was much too old to sleep with his parents.

When he was fourteen and lying awake thinking about how he dropped the ball during a game the other day and cost their team a point, he wondered if it was unusual to have spent so much time in his mom’s arms. It took him another hour to fall asleep, but that was normal, like everything else in his life; normal like the calluses forming on his hands from the bat and the catcher’s mitt, normal like standing a foot apart from a girl at the first school dance, and normal like the eggs his dad made him every morning.

 

_age 16_

 

At sixteen, he’s lying beside Rachel in bed for the first time and she curls into him, lifting his arm so it’s wrapped around her. “This is nice,” she says and she’s facing away from him, so it’s muffled. He hums in response, wondering if this is what love is, or what teenage love is.

He lasts ten minutes of spooning before murmuring into her ear, “This is a little uncomfortable.”

“Oh,” says Rachel and she scoots away from him, turning in bed to face him.

“It’s just—I’m a little hot,” he says because he is. He feels hot and sticky and sweaty and he doesn’t really want to touch Rachel. He feels like he should want to touch Rachel but it’s July and her parent’s air conditioner is broken so really, it makes sense that he doesn’t want to spoon.

“That’s okay.” He can see her take her lower lip between her teeth and look down. He should kiss her. He should comfort her. So he does.

She looks a little less nervous when he pulls away. “I’m sorry, I just get hot at night,” he tells her. “Really, that’s it.”

Now she looks much less nervous and she kisses him again lightly. “That’s okay,” she repeats. “It’s really okay, Patrick. As long as you don’t regret it, it’s okay.”

“I don’t,” he says without thinking. He doesn’t. Rachel is small and soft against him, and she’s nice and funny and _gets_ him. She likes the Blue Jays and playing whiffle ball at the beach and she bikes to school. So he doesn’t regret it. They’ve been together a while and they were taking things slow, or they were before tonight.

Patrick didn’t really know what slow meant because he was too afraid to ask anyone, so he just followed Rachel’s lead. She had been the one to bring it up, asking if it was okay that they just stuck to shirts on for a while and for some reason, a lot of the tension in his body melted away when he said he wanted to go slow too. Rachel had beamed at him and kissed him for the third time and then he should have lost count of how many times they kissed but he didn’t; he kept a running tally in his head, unsure as to why.

When he had told Rachel, she had blushed and looked down, pushing her short red hair out of her face and telling him that was sweet. He hadn’t done it to be sweet; it just happened naturally. He isn’t sure if he’s counting away from something or toward something.

“I’m glad you don’t,” she says. “Regret it. I don’t. It was nice.”

Is nice the right word? Should he say it was nice back? What did Rachel want to hear from him? They’ve been together for months and it feels like he should know what she wanted to hear. “I thought it was nice too,” he says and there’s a lock of hair falling over her eyes so he reaches over and tucks it behind her ear. Her cheeks flush pink, noticeable even in the low light. “So nice, I’m completely wiped,” he tells her, voice light and teasing.

She blushes redder and tells him they can go to bed now and promises they don’t have to cuddle, jokes they don’t have to touch at all.

Patrick laughs and tells her yeah, he doesn’t want to touch her at all and closes his eyes, still chuckling, and then spends the next three hours staring at Rachel’s flowered curtains, the same ones she’s had since middle school when he met her, when she first moved to the neighborhood and had a birthday party and they all went up to her room. He had been leaning against the wall, awkward, gangly legs pulled up to his chest and he had fiddled with the hem of those curtains as they played spin the bottle.

They go to the lake the next day, with all their friends, and Rachel rests her head in Patrick’s lap. He runs his hands through her hair, twisting a lock between his fingers, and her eyes fall shut. She looks so peaceful, sun-dappled and half-asleep. He lets the lock of hair drop and leans back so he’s lying down too, looking up at the sky and thinking about how this is what good things feel like.

They’re woken up to someone throwing water on them and then Patrick is lifting Rachel into his arms, throwing her in the lake, her laugh swallowed by the water. She runs at him, soaked to the bone and pulls him in. He doesn’t even try to resist, letting her tug him in the water and dunk his head under. He’s laughing too and he has to spit out a mouthful of lake water when he surfaces, winding his arms around her waist and pulling her close.

Rachel laughs into his shoulder, pressing a kiss to the skin there and whispering that she loves him.

He stills. There’s a beat and then Rachel stiffens too. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—I know we’re not saying that but I just, well I felt it, and I wanted to say it. I love you,” she says and the tight feeling in his chest must be what she’s feeling too so he cups her cheek to pull her into a kiss. Distantly, he can hear wolf-whistles.

“I love you, too,” he says back because she’s looking at him expectantly and he probably does. Love her, that is. He probably does love her. She makes him laugh and they were each other’s first time and who cares that he didn’t like it all that much, no one likes their first time.

Rachel lights up in his arms, eyes shining. He moves his hands to rest at the small of her back and then she’s pulling them deeper into the water so she can wrap her arms around his waist and kiss him properly.

The whole time he’s feeling reckless and irresponsible like they’ve done something wrong by saying they love each other when they don’t know what love is. Rachel doesn’t know what love is and neither does he, but she probably knows that and if he knows that and she knows that, then they won’t be assigning weighty meanings to the words.

It never occurs to him that his logic is flawed.

Eventually, they walk home, barefoot and sunburned and Rachel’s hand is steady and constant in his. He drops her off at her door, kissing her outside before her parents come out, and then he’s roped into dinner. Rachel asks if he wants to spend the night and he tells her he has early practice the next day, which he doesn’t, and he walks home thinking about how nice it is to have Rachel, to have someone that loves him as she does.

He sleeps well that night until he doesn’t, waking at four to roll onto his side, eyes falling on the Javy Lopez poster on the opposite wall. It’s one of his newer ones and his dad had given him a hard time for putting up a player who wasn’t on the Jays, but he did it anyway. He can appreciate other players for their skills, he told his dad. And Javy Lopez has good form. Patrick is a catcher too, so he watches Javy for tips, squinting at the TV to figure out how he can squat like him. He’d like to be like Javy, he thinks. He’d like to be as good as Javy Lopez. And maybe he can get there by watching him.

That’s what he’s thinking about as he tries to go back to sleep. He thinks about Javy Lopez crouching behind the plate, thinks about what a good arm he has, thinks about his signals to his pitcher, his quick fingers and hands.

The next morning when he’s in the shower and he’s letting his hands wander, he thinks of Rachel but gets distracted and starts thinking about Javy Lopez’s hands and comes so fast he doesn’t even think about it. He’s out of it today, preoccupied with preseason and college applications. That’s what he tells himself as he towels off.

 

_age 17_

 

Will is tall, but he wasn’t always. In seventh grade, he begged to play pitcher but he was told he was too short and somehow between seventh grade and high school, he shot up, almost like he willed it to happen. So now he’s Patrick’s pitcher and he does things like grab his arm after practice to pull him aside so they can go over signals. Pitchers and catchers have to be so in sync it’s like second nature, so that’s what it becomes; second nature for Will to throw an arm around him as they walk to the locker room, to pull him into a close hug after a close win, have entire conversations between home plate and the mound without saying anything.

He can tell when Will is overthinking his pitches, knows to call a timeout so he can jog to the mound, put his hands on Will’s shoulders and look him in the eye to tell him to focus.

It’s important, it’s their last game of the year, and Will’s hands are shaking, so Patrick puts all his energy toward bringing him back down to earth and trying not to think about the way Will’s blue eyes look under his cap or the way he’s worrying his lower lip between his teeth.

Later, Patrick won’t remember what he said to him, but it works, because he’s inhaling deeply and stepping away, nodding at Patrick and telling him they got this.

Patrick grins at him, wide and relieved, because he knows Will and knows that he means it. Will mirrors the look and Patrick’s heart stutters in his chest and it’s probably because it’s the last game of the season and the field is saturated with nervous energy; except that he also thinks it’s probably not because he knows what nerves about a game feel like and it’s not this. This is fluttering in his stomach and a loose, thrilled feeling in his chest and they haven’t even won yet.

Will claps him on the back and says something. Patrick blinks and shakes his head quickly. “You good to go?” Will repeats, a slight furrow in his brow.

“Yeah,” Patrick says and nods, all sorts of unsaid words stuck in his throat. Will’s face relaxes into a smile again and Patrick returns it. They both inhale deeply at the same time before letting the breath out, and Patrick jogs back to his place behind home plate.

Just as Will is getting ready to wind up his pitch, he makes eye contact with Patrick and nods once, and then Patrick is focusing on the game and nothing else.

When they win, Will runs at Patrick and lifts him an inch off the ground with the force of his hug. Patrick tucks his chin in, grinning widely into Will’s neck and letting out a muffled sort of laugh.

Will pulls away from the hug and he’s talking a mile a minute; it’s the adrenaline from winning the championships, Patrick tells himself, that makes him want to close the space between them, press his lips to Will’s and cut him off mid-sentence. He’s affectionate when he’s excited; he kisses Rachel instead when she runs at him from the stands. She reaches up on tiptoes to throw her arms around him, grinning against his lips. He’s happy and relieved and feeling victorious except that for a second he isn’t. It’s the first time a kiss from Rachel doesn’t feel like enough.

Rachel gets him tickets to a Jays game for his birthday a week later, tells him to bring Will. He picks up Will first because he lives closer, pulling up to the curb slowly as he sees Will leave his house, Jays cap on backward, dressed entirely in the team’s colors. He gets into the car, asks Patrick how his weekend was, tells him happy birthday and hands him a thin square wrapped in newspaper.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t wrap it that well. Should’ve asked my mom to do it,” Will tells him as Patrick carefully unwraps it. Will laughs. “Dude, just rip it!”

“But then how would I read the newspaper after?” asks Patrick, deadpan, pausing to look at Will. Will shoves his shoulder, and Patrick can’t help but break; his lips curl into a smile as he takes a blank CD out. “Oh, wow, I’m so touched.”

“It’s a mixtape, dumbass.” Will hands him a sheet of notebook paper with a scrawl at the top that reads _Happy Birthday!_ Patrick recognizes some of the tracks, knowing Will put them on because he knows they’re his favorite songs; but there are some he doesn’t know and he’s already reading into those titles. He looks back to Will, who is chewing on his lower lip, brow knit. Patrick has been quiet for too long.

“Thank you,” he says, slow and grateful, turning his lips downward so they don’t curve into a smile of their own volition. Will takes the disc from him and puts it into the CD player so Patrick takes that as his cue to put the car into drive. He drives ten miles below the speed limit on the way to Rachel’s and doesn’t know why.

Rachel is sitting on the curb outside her building when they drive up, wearing a Jays shirt that used to belong to Patrick and her hair is tied up in a bun, wisps of hair floating around her head like a halo. Patrick puts the car in park and Will gets out of the front seat, giving Rachel a high five and pulling her into a hug before he opens the front door again, stepping aside so Rachel can get in. She kisses Patrick on the cheek as Will gets into the backseat.

The Jays lose but every time they hit a home run, Patrick half turns to Will to hug him; it’s instinct and one he ignores, lifting Rachel in the air and grinning into her hair and trying not to think about it.

After he drops Rachel off, he drives to Will’s house and they sit outside talking for so long that Patrick turns the car off so he doesn’t waste energy. When Will’s words trail off, Patrick thinks about how maybe if he wasn’t with Rachel, he’d lean over and kiss him, or ask if he could kiss him, or ask if Will liked him, liked boys like he did; _thinks_ he likes boys like Patrick does, he hasn’t tried but he thinks he wants to but he can’t, so he slots that thought into a box he tells himself he isn’t going to lock shut but does.

 

_age 18_

 

Four months into their freshman year of college, Rachel comes to visit and he thinks about how he’s just one of those people that doesn’t sleep well with other people in bed. Rachel is tiny and folds comfortably against him in the small twin bed. It’s late autumn and not too hot in the room but Rachel’s skin is sticky against his and he almost wishes he could put a sheet between them, just one sheer layer so he could fall asleep more easily. It might hurt Rachel if he suggested it and he feels as though they’re already on thin ice.

Their argument from graduation is still echoing in his ears, seven months later.

He doesn’t remember much but he remembers Rachel asking if he wanted to break up just for the first semester, just so they could try things out. She had asked it in the way that meant she didn’t want him to say yes, which he wasn’t planning on doing, but it had irritated him that she had asked that way. So he asked why she couldn’t just tell him that she didn’t want to break up like all their other friends and because it took him fifteen minutes to say that he emphatically didn’t want to break up, she had started crying.

He hadn’t wanted to make her cry on their graduation day, so he pulled her close and told her he loved her and didn’t want to break up. She cried into his shoulder, wet spots on his button-down appearing and her tears seeping through to his skin.

“I’m glad you don’t want to break up,” she had said when he pulled away.

He told her, “Me too,” and then kissed her.

Rachel was grinning widely in all their graduation pictures, arm in arm with Patrick, then one with her on his back, then with all their friends. He looks happy too, which is funny because he hadn’t been particularly happy that day. When his mom asked why he was so quiet, he told her he was sad to be leaving high school. She hugged him and ran her thumb over the hair just by his ear like she had when he was little and she pushed the curls back from his forehead, out of his eyes.

He thinks maybe Rachel had sensed something but she never brought it up, which is why they’re on thin ice months later and Patrick is wondering why he feels so tired at age eighteen.

Rachel had fallen asleep hours ago. She could fall asleep anywhere. It was something he loved about her. Sharing a sleeping bag on their senior camping trip, she was out in seconds. The time they drove six hours to see her favorite band and she twisted herself into a pretzel to get comfortable in the front seat, fast asleep for most of the drive home.

She fell asleep the second her head hit the one pillow in his twin dorm room bed, so he twisted over on his side and now he’s facing the concrete wall of his dorm room and thinking about how he has class at nine and a paper due at noon and how if he doesn’t fall asleep before two he won’t be able to focus. The more he thinks about the time, the more he thinks about sleep, the harder it is to do it.

Rachel knows him like the palm of her hand, knows he touches his cuticles when he’s nervous, picks at them when he’s really anxious. She knows the calluses of his hands, knows they get stronger when he’s stressed, knows it’s because he goes to the batting cages for hours. She knows the tan line from his wristwatch, the short hair at the back of his neck, the scar on the knuckles of his left hand from when he got his hand stuck in the door in the parking lot at a Jays game.

She knows he lost half his baby teeth when he got hit in the face with a ball at little league, was in the stands when he screamed in his mom’s arms. She talks to his mom when he’s not there, watches baseball with his dad when he’s helping with dinner, babysits his baby cousins, was there when his aunt Carol said she would make a good mother and his mom told her they were too young to talk about that.

It’s comforting and terrifying for her to know all that; to have a person that knew him before his eighth-grade growth spurt, before he figured out how to move all those gangly limbs, before baseball filled him out; and she keeps coming back. They both keep coming back, and that has to mean something.

If you love someone, he thinks, and you keep coming back to each other, there’s a reason.

 

_age 19_

 

Adam has floppy brown hair and big wire-rim glasses and talks about Foucault. Patrick meets him in lit class on a Monday his sophomore year and thinks he might hate him a little, until Adam comes up to him after class and asks if Patrick was equally lost during lecture.

He’s running his hands through his hair, making it stand up on end and Patrick’s eyes want to track the movement. He’s hesitant because Adam knows about Foucault and wants you to know he knows about Foucault but his glasses keep sliding down his nose and he keeps pushing them up with his forefinger and something warm settles in Patrick’s chest.

It takes Patrick less than a week to realize he’s looking at Adam’s lips when he’s talking to him.

It doesn’t hit him like a ton of bricks; he sits next to him in class, lends him pens when he forgets his, and packs his bag slowly so they can walk out together. Adam likes to tap his left thumb against his desk when he’s about to say something, one hand in the air expectantly.

He doesn’t only talk about Foucault anymore and when Patrick points this out, Adam grins at him and says, “No, I talk about Marx too.”

Adam reads Foucault and Marx because he’s a history major, Patrick learns. He took a theory class last term and it has little to do with the economics class they’re in now but Adam tells him that the whole term that they were talking about discourse as hierarchical, Adam was just barely treading water, so he read _The History of Sexuality_ over winter break so it wouldn’t happen again; that’s why he likes bringing up Foucault. Patrick tells him that’s cocky and a bit braggy and Adam says that if you read _The History of Sexuality_ in a week, you’ve gained the right to be cocky and a bit braggy.

He tells him as much when they’re studying for a midterm and sitting at a table across from each other. Their knees keep knocking together and Patrick can’t focus; he’s going to fail this midterm because Adam keeps looking up to glance at him and he’s doing the same.

The space between them is crackling with inevitability, like everything is known even if neither of them has said anything. It’s an easy acceptance until the light, fluttery feeling in his stomach turns sour.

It’s easy to forget that Patrick is pointedly and purposefully residing in this liminal space between _almost_ and _not yet_ but _someday_ and that it has to stay that way.

His cellphone vibrates in his back pocket. It’s his mom and his stomach turns; Rachel is home for the weekend and she’s going to drop by his house, call him when she’s there so he can talk to her and his parents. He declines the call and looks back at his textbook.

Adam asks him out on a sunny day in March, ears pink from the cold and hands shoved in the pockets of his big winter jacket. He scratches the back of his neck and says, “Hey, would you want to get dinner sometime?”

Patrick wants to say yes. The word is almost out of his mouth before he remembers and the sudden, euphoric feeling in his stomach is replaced with something thick and heavy and nauseating. “I have a girlfriend,” he says.

“Oh.” Adam looks down, and Patrick thinks about how sad his eyes look behind his big wire-rim glasses and how he sort of wants to ask Adam to hold that thought, run back to his dorm so he can call Rachel and...he’s not sure what he would say. He’s not breaking up with her over the phone. He’s not breaking up with her for a boy he’s known for two months. (He wants to).

Adam is nice and courteous and they stay friends but one time Patrick touches his arm and Adam sort of flinches, and Patrick wonders if it’s wildly irresponsible to drive to Rachel so they can talk.

A month later, he sees Adam with another boy, a boy in an overlarge jean jacket and black jeans, and they’re holding hands and Patrick tells himself he’s happy for him.

They don’t really talk again.

He should talk to someone, he thinks. He’s at his desk and it’s late the night before a final and he’s thinking about maybe he needs to talk to someone about this thing with boys. He thinks he wants to examine that, he thinks he wants to figure it all out.

His screensaver on his phone is of Rachel and their friends at the beach; he can’t examine those things if he’s with Rachel, he doesn’t think it would be fair to her. But breaking up with her over a maybe doesn’t feel fair. But he can’t stay with her either.

When he breaks up with Rachel that summer, he walks around his town, and later campus, hoping, wishing, praying someone else is going to ask him out so this time he won’t have to say he has a girlfriend. The only people that ask him out are girls but he doesn’t know them like he knows Rachel and besides, it’s nice to be open and free in college. He goes on third dates, even fourth, fifth and sixth dates, but never past that and he’s happy mostly. He doesn’t have a reason to be sad; so he isn’t.

 

_age 24_

 

Rachel spends the night of her 24th birthday at his apartment for the first time in a year; their longest break yet that ends when he runs into in a bar.

He’s waiting for a pitcher of beer to take back to the table, fingers tapping against the bar. The bartender had guessed his order on the first try and let his hand brush Patrick’s when he took his card; Patrick has been the one to get the next round each time. Now he’s watching the curve of his shoulders, the lines of his back as he faces away from him, swiping Patrick’s card. When he turns around, Patrick is going to write his number on the receipt.

The bartender turns around and he’s grinning widely at Patrick, making a joke, handing the card back. There’s a voice in his head that says he’s being friendly except then Patrick ribs him right back and he doesn’t miss the way his gaze slips to his mouth.

Patrick reaches into his pocket for a pen, sliding the receipt closer. He signs it, learns the bartender’s name, and writes the first number of his cell phone on the bottom of the receipt when someone taps on his shoulder.

Rachel is standing beside him, grinning widely. Patrick blinks once, then twice, tells himself this should be his last beer because the room just spun a bit as Rachel pulled him into a hug.

When he turns back to the bar, the receipt is gone.

They sit at the bar, set apart from her friends, and talk for hours. She’s been promoted and he has too, both moving into more permanent positions, and their knees keep knocking together. He orders her another drink, knowing what she likes, and drinks enough beer for his stomach to roll.

He tells her he’s proud of her, because he is. She’s let her hair grow long. She’s on her way to a dream career. They’re adults now, sitting at bars and catching up.

She’s putting her coat on and he helps her with it out of habit, thinking how nice it is that they can be friends. They were in high school, in the before. He likes that they can return to that. It feels natural, like sliding back into a well-known role. He can be Rachel’s friend and thinks he’s better at being that than Rachel’s boyfriend.

She asks him to walk her out and he does because he’s leaving too and she stands on the curb beside him. She should be walking in the other direction, but she isn’t and it hits Patrick like a ton of bricks. They’re not friends.

Just as the thought occurs to him, Rachel goes on tiptoes and kisses him. He’s still to her touch and she senses it, pulling away and stepping back, burying her face in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she says over and over. “I thought—”

He knows what she thought. He was nice and courteous all night, laughing with her and letting her touch his knee. When he was thinking about being friends, Rachel was thinking they were getting back together.

“No, it’s okay,” he says finally and he coughs into his hand, then runs his fingers across his calluses. He could walk in the other direction, tell her those feelings are gone. But he doesn’t. He thinks about that bartender and about how all this energy has to go somewhere. He asks if she wants a nightcap.

Rachel nods and tries not to smile and it feels terrible; he feels terrible. He needs to tell her he can’t do this again but he’s too tired and she really does look pretty tonight and her lips were soft against his and he didn’t hate it, so maybe he _could_ do this again. Maybe now that they’re settled. They’re adults. They have jobs and pay rent and do their taxes without help from their parents. Stability was always what they needed.

Because he knows Rachel like Rachel knows him; through the silences and the in-betweens of the nearly ten years they’ve been together. He knows her ticklish spot under her knee, knows that her dad used to torture her with it, drawing endless laughs from her before he moved out. He knows that she loves baseball the same way he does, knows that she can throw her legs in his lap and sit on the couch in silence to watch a game that could go on for hours, knows that her favorite thing to eat during those days is pretzels and hummus, knows she refuses to eat anything else once she’s settled in.

He knows she twists the hair at the nape of her neck when she’s thinking hard, twists it around and around and then pulls on it as if she can pull the idea from her mind. He knows that she likes it when her hair is long now because it means she can let it fall in fans over her face as she writes, keeping whatever is on the page a secret.

He knows the dimples in her cheeks when she’s remembering something fond, knows the rasp in her voice only appears when she’s sad, knows the lines in her forehead when she’s confused or surprised.

He thinks he loves those things about her. He thinks he misses those things about her too, and if he misses them, and misses the way it feels to have someone love him in his entirety, then getting back together is what he should do. That’s what people do when they find someone like Rachel. He has no reason to complain; complaining would be ungrateful.

There’s no reason for him to be as unhappy as he thinks he is; if there’s no reason, then he isn’t, he tells himself.

Two months later, Rachel moves in.

The night she does, they eat pizza off paper plates on the floor and she throws grease-stained napkins at his head when he teases her. She tells him to _stop, stop, Patrick, stop it, my stomach hurts, stop making me laugh!_ It’s one of their better nights; no cutting remarks about who takes out the trash, no turning away from the other so they don’t see a roll of their eyes.

He feels good, like maybe this is right and what will make it stick. The pit that’s settled in his stomach since they got back together is finally gone so he kisses her in the kitchen just because. Rachel melts into him and pulls away looking flushed, like her world has sort of tilted on its axis. She always looks like that after he kisses her just because.

He wonders what that feels like. Rachel is better at wearing her heart on her sleeve; that’s what it is. She feels the same as him probably, really deep down. Because kisses that make the world tilt on its axis aren’t a reality. If they were, he would have felt it already.

His mom calls when Rachel is putting her clothes in drawers and Rachel jumps on the bed, grabbing for the phone. He chuckles and tells his mom he’s passing Rachel the phone just as she lands on him, caging him in and snatching the phone from him, asking his mom about her new yoga instructor. She crawls off of him and tucks his phone between her ear and shoulder, neatly placing her clothes from the open box beside her into his dresser, sliding his tee shirts to the side.

He props himself up on one elbow, throat tightening. He thinks the heat might be broken so he wipes the sweat from the back of his neck.

Rachel is telling his mom about the move, how much nicer it is that they can share a better apartment by splitting the rent. She tells his mom it’s nice to be stable for the first time in their twenties and she turns around to look at Patrick as she says it, eyes crinkling with her wide grin. It takes him more effort than it should to pull his lips into a smile.

 

_age 26_

 

He’s laying on a couch in an apartment that isn’t his and he’s thinking about how twenty-six feels too old to be sleeping on a couch in an apartment that isn’t his for the third time in two years. They last longer each time. First, it’s four months before Patrick calls a friend from college and asks if he can crash for a week, then eight months, then a year. Sometimes it’s just a night breaking the months up; once he has to live at his parents’ for a month. It’s been a week now since he’s seen her but she’s texted him three times, two of them by accident, she says.

He wants it to last longer than a week, he thinks as he stares at a ceiling that isn’t his from a couch that isn’t his. The thought comes unbidden and a sick feeling curls into his stomach; shame towards her, mostly, but something stronger than irritation toward himself.

He’s going to look for his own apartment. He’s going to find his own apartment, sign the lease over to Rachel on the other one, and hope that signatures and separate spaces will make it easier.

He needs room to breathe, or that’s what he told her, quiet as he folded work shirts into a suitcase. Rachel had stood there, arms crossed over her chest, looking small and tense. She kept opening her mouth to say something, then closing it, before she forced out an apology. He didn’t remember what she was apologizing for. Whatever it had been, it was small and insignificant and definitely not reason enough for him to move out, but he had anyway.

He moves back in two weeks later. Rachel is tucked into his side, her head resting on his chest. She pushes herself up so she can rest her chin in her hands. She smiles, reaches a hand up to run her finger across his hairline. “I’m glad we’re doing this,” she says.

“Me too.” The words feel thick in his mouth. He had missed her, or maybe he just hated sleeping on other peoples’ couches.

 

_age 28_

 

Patrick proposes to Rachel on a sunny Saturday in May. They’re sitting outside at her favorite restaurant and he’s so nervous he can’t eat a thing. He tells her he had a late breakfast, brushing off her concerned look. He lets her order the chocolate cake for dessert even if she makes him promise to share it with her. The waiter brings over the check and Rachel is digging in her purse for her wallet, eyes down, so Patrick slides off his chair and onto one knee.

The ring is in his back pocket and it had been digging into his skin since he sat down. He pulls it from his pocket just as Rachel looks up. Her jaw drops and inhales audibly and there are gasps from around the restaurant.

He doesn’t remember what he tells her and he’s not entirely sure it’s at all romantic but she tears up and puts a hand over her mouth and she whispers “I love you,” when he puts the ring on her finger.

She looks beautiful that day, her red hair shining in the sun. She’s wearing one of her favorite sundresses after eating her favorite meal during her favorite time of year at her favorite restaurant. She tells him the ring is perfect and she calls her mom later, tearfully telling her it was all so perfect.

They get dinner with their friends later in the week and they tell them, of course, they’re getting married, they’re perfect and their wedding will be perfect.

“Come look at this perfect venue,” Rachel says across the apartment. “You have to see this perfect bakery,” she says another day. “I found the perfect bridesmaid dresses.”

At their engagement party, Rachel's best friend calls their story “a perfect romance,” and her mother wishes them all the “perfect happiness in the world.” Patrick throws up in the bathroom and blames it on the seafood.

When he thinks about why he proposed, he organizes it into a neat list in his head, numbered and organized not in order of importance but when he thought them; because he wanted to stop breaking up, because she was his best friend, because everyone else was getting married, because she was comfortable and because she knows him.

He repeats the list in his mind; it’s good to think of all the reasons he wants to marry Rachel, he tells himself, instead of thinking about how it’s starting to sound like he’s convincing himself of something, something nebulous that keeps getting farther and farther out of reach.

He lands on something tangible three months after the engagement; if he breaks it off now, he won’t see Rachel again, or he might but she won’t be in his life, not really. It isn’t like before anymore; they won’t be able to get drinks and he won’t be able to think about how nice it is that they can be friends. They’ve been friends since sixth grade. He doesn’t know what life without Rachel looks like.

They don’t break up once during the engagement and that’s what Patrick repeats in his mind, the idea getting firmer in his mind as six months pass, then a year, and then two years. They hit the two-year mark and like clockwork, questions are asked about setting a date, booking a caterer and a venue. He starts screening calls from his mom, feeling sick when he does it, because he knows she’s going to ask.

Rachel sends him emails with links to barns in the country, ballrooms in the city, the park near where they grew up, and he promises to look at them when work slows down, except that work doesn’t slow down and Rachel’s emails get more persistent, the subject lines reading more insistent than before. Eventually, she gets tired and he gets tired and she says things like _Please...just look at this one caterer tonight_ until one night she curls into a ball and faces him and says it doesn’t feel like he wants to get married.

He tells her he does because he proposed to her and you don’t propose to people unless you want to marry them. Rachel looks like she’s going to cry so he kisses her and pulls her into a hug. She falls asleep in his arms and they don’t talk about it in the morning, or the morning after that.

On a Sunday, she sits cross-legged in bed with her computer and tells him about the dress fitting she’s booked and he’s doing math in his head the whole time, trying to figure out how much Rachel is going to spend on a wedding dress she might not even use.

The thought occurs to him before he can brush it away and he almost opens his mouth and asks her to slow down, maybe they should talk about the wedding and marriage, except they’ve been going slow for the past two years; they’ve been going slow their whole lives together. He can already imagine the hurt look on her face when he asks her to slow down.

 

_age 30_

 

Two weeks before he packs five boxes into his car, Patrick wakes at five am to a siren. The sun is sending long shadows across the apartment, just barely poking above the horizon; Rachel’s breath is even and quiet beside him. Her hand is tucked under her chin, her engagement ring just visible; in a few months, it’ll be a wedding band.

He gets up, splashes water on his face, gets back into bed. It’s worse now that he’s truly awake, so he turns away from her. But he can still feel the weight of her body in the bed, the heat from her skin, so he walks to the couch and sits down, head in his hands. He remembers that putting your head between your legs helps with nausea, so that’s what he does and tries not to vomit on the carpet. His stomach stops rolling. He digs the heel of his hands into his eyes as if he can clog up his tear ducts, stop the stinging feeling.

If he makes any noise, if he lets himself cry, Rachel will hear and if Rachel hears she’ll wake up and if she wakes up, she’ll ask him what’s wrong and if she asks him what’s wrong he thinks he might break up with her.

His breath is shallow as he throws a change of clothes into a bag. He pulls on jeans, types out a text to Rachel he’ll send in the morning, and takes his keys. He makes it almost to his parents' house, watching the sun come up over the highway when he sees the exit. There’s no one on the road to see him turn his car around illegally.

He makes it back to the apartment half an hour before their alarms go off, closing his eyes and thinking about how close he came to driving past his parents’ exit, how close he was to just driving for hours past their house until he felt like stopping.

Rachel is quiet in the morning. He thinks she knows; not that he left, she’s a deep sleeper, he thinks with a clench of his heart. He’s tired all the way down to his bones, leaving work late and dinners with friends early.

She bought him a bottle of melatonin last week, pressed it into his palm before bed and told him she can tell he hasn’t been sleeping. He tells her they help, even though they don’t, even though he has a heavy, guilty feeling deep in his stomach.

A week later, Rachel is signing a check for a deposit on the venue, slipping it into an envelope and it’s a lot of money, a lot of nonrefundable money. He asks her to talk, rubs at his old baseball calluses, and when she looks up at him, eyes wide, he knows she knows.

He thinks maybe he should have told her to sell the ring, just so she would know the finality of it all, but that feels unnecessary and cruel, so he doesn’t. He just lets her cry into his shoulder and tells her it’s not anything she’s done because really, it isn’t; he hopes she believes him, so he says it over and over with new words.

The sentiment is still the same; he has to leave, marriage won’t change anything, he did love her in a certain kind of way, he just needs to get out, he needs something new.

He doesn’t tell her about the tight feeling in his chest that settled there comfortably since he got down on one knee, or maybe even before that; it might have been there for much much longer. He tells her the apartment is hers, he’ll be the one to leave and she goes to her parents so he can pack. By the time he’s done, it’s nearly ten and he’s sitting in a half-bare apartment. He should feel worse. It’s been fourteen years and all he feels is something like relief.

The next week he drives to Schitt’s Creek and doesn’t stop until the sun comes up, meets Ray just as he’s opening up his four different businesses.

 

_coda_

 

Patrick isn’t sure what makes him do it, but he’s leaning in quite suddenly and nudging his nose against David’s jaw, watching as David’s eyes flutter, opening to look at Patrick blearily before squeezing shut. He knew he would wake before David, thinks he should probably feel more tired than he does considering how little sleep happened in Stevie’s apartment last night.

“Mmmh, no,” David says, burying his face in the pillow. It draws a laugh from Patrick’s lips, a laugh that comes from somewhere deep inside him. He feels weightless in the bed beside David, like David could just exhale near him and he would float away.

“Good morning,” Patrick says and David screws his face into a grimace, eyes still shut.

“No,” he says, then finally opens his eyes and looks at Patrick. " _Not_ good morning.”

Patrick laughs again—he’s never laughed in bed this much in his life. It makes a sort of sense that it would be like this with David, who makes him laugh all the time. Everything about last night made sense, Patrick thinks as he watches David rub the sleep from his eyes. “Not a good morning?” he asks.

“I mean, _good_ morning.” David gestures between them, at the sheets pooled at Patrick’s hips, at all that bare skin. “I’m not so happy about it being _morning_.”

“That’s a surprise.” He can feel his lips twitch into a smirk but he doesn’t allow David time for a retort, pressing his mouth to his. David pulls away too soon, grimacing again.

“Morning breath,” he says, wiping at his mouth and leaning away.

“David?” Patrick shifts closer so he can press his forehead against David’s. “I don’t care.” And then he kisses him again and they don’t really stop until David is digging his nails into Patrick’s back, the sound of Patrick’s name on David’s lips muffled into Patrick’s neck as he comes.

It’s a lot all at once, Patrick thinks as he lies back against the pillows when David goes to the bathroom. He should feel winded from it all, and he does. But he isn’t tired. He feels alert, like everything has been sharpened into focus.

He’s been sleeping better recently. His mom asked about it the last time she called, hesitant like she didn’t want him to know she worried, and he told her there was something in the country air that helped him sleep. The whole time on the call he was thinking about how it felt to wake up with David tucked into his side in his terrible bed at Ray’s that was only better than David’s bed at the motel.

He had known, before last night, before Stevie offered them her apartment, that he likes sharing a bed with David. He likes that David steals the covers and makes soft, contented noises in his sleep, sometimes nuzzling into the crook of Patrick’s neck. He likes the way David throws a leg over Patrick’s before they fall asleep, limbs so tangled Patrick isn’t sure how David does it without him noticing, and how slowly David unwinds himself as they close their eyes for real that time.

He feels a sudden rush of guilt, thick and heavy in his stomach; he wonders if it was Rachel he couldn’t share a bed with, or was it women in general, or is it just David he could sleep with? A part of him wants to know. He wants to know if it’s just David, because if it’s just David, he thinks he might be in danger.

He had a feeling, a month and a half ago when David had stood in the store and told him that it was like his first time too, that he was in danger, but now that he’s lying here, naked in bed and waiting for David to come out of the bathroom, he thinks he knows he’s in danger.

He also knows he’s gay, very gay and it feels nice to know; no, it feels euphoric to know. The word settles in his chest, warm and comforting and constant. It feels like he kind of gets what people mean when they cry when they’re happy. He’s never done that. He thinks he might right now.

David comes out eventually, wearing sweatpants and a black hoodie that probably costs three times as much of Patrick’s rent, and smelling of tea tree oil. “Hi,” he says, shifting his weight as he looks at Patrick. Patrick pushes himself up in bed and sits back against the pillows.

“Hi,” he says, even though they’ve already said good morning. “Do you want breakfast?” he asks because at some point they’re going to have to leave this apartment and he doesn’t think he could handle breakfast at the café right now.

David nods and watches as Patrick crawls out of bed, pulling on boxers, then sweatpants and a threadbare tee. He thinks David is going to follow him into the kitchen, but he stops him halfway, hands ghosting up his chest before coming to rest over his heart. Patrick waits for him to say something, or do something like kiss him, but he doesn’t. He just stands there, feeling Patrick for what feels like several million long seconds but is probably just five.

“Breakfast sounds amazing,” he says finally and walks into the kitchen, Patrick trailing behind him. David puts on a pot of coffee and asks if he wants tea. Patrick shakes his head, because he doesn’t think Stevie owns a bag of tea but mostly because he thinks if he were to have caffeine right now he’d burst out of his skin. He might never need caffeine again if this is what sex with David is like.

David can’t stop touching him, even as they move around each other. He reaches for a mug and put his hand on Patrick’s shoulder, walks past him to the sink and trails his fingers down his back, wraps his arms around his waist from behind as Patrick stares at the toaster. His chin is resting on his shoulder as he mumbles about Stevie’s bread and ancient toaster and how he’s not even sure she has butter.

Patrick reaches up to pat his cheek, telling David he thinks they’ll survive. David makes an indignant sort of noise, but it’s half-hearted and turns into a low sigh as Patrick’s runs his thumb along David’s jaw.

He wishes he was facing David right now; just as he thinks it, David’s hands move down his sides to settle at his hips, turning him around.

David tilts his head toward Patrick, lips a breath away from his, but Patrick deflects, leaning back. “Wait…” he says, trying not to grin at the look on David’s face, “Have you brushed your teeth?”

“Shut up.” Patrick’s laugh is muffled by David’s lips against his and he doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to that feeling, or the way David is pressing him to the counter, his hands steady on his hips as he opens his mouth against his. Patrick arches into him, chasing his lips each time David moves at all, like he wants to wrap himself around him and never let go.

Kissing David is addictive; Patrick thinks he’d be content to do nothing else for the rest of his life, just kissing David until his lips are chapped and he can’t breathe. His hands are tangled in David’s hair, embarrassingly needy noises coming out of his mouth as David slips his hands under his tee to grasp at the skin of his hips, fingers digging in.

Behind him, the toaster starts creaking and something starts to smell burnt. David startles against him, letting out a groan as Patrick pulls away, twisting around to peer into it. The toast is blackened beyond being edible and David is grimacing over his shoulder.

Patrick drives him to Elm Valley for breakfast and David talks about how hungry he is the whole way there, even if he was the one who insisted they avoid the cafe. Patrick doesn’t care. He puts on Norah Jones and holds David’s hand with the one that isn’t on the wheel and smiles.

 

 

 

 

_I need no soft lights to enchant me_

_If you'll only grant me the right_

_To hold you ever so tight_

_And to feel in the night the nearness of you_

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to aly ([wardo_wedidit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wardo_wedidit/pseuds/wardo_wedidi)) for your endless support, your incredibly useful comments, and your willingness to let me cry to you about patrick "peanut butter" brewer at all hours of the night, claire for helping with all baseball ideas (javy lopez being patrick's childhood crush is 100% her doing) and her help with the math with patrick's age and school year, proving that some of us can do math. reed (livelyvague here and [patrickanddavid](http://www.patrickanddavid.tumblr.com) on tumblr for being so so lovely and the first person who ever read a draft of this fic. emma ([mmmeatglass](http://www.mmmeatglass.tumblr.com) on tumblr) for being such a lovely lovely useful beta. and to my lesbian and lesbian adjacent sc friends for letting me ask questions and being incredibly annoying about this fic. you know who you are and i love you.
> 
> you can find me on tumblr at [brewerspatrick](http://www.brewerspatrick.tumblr.com).
> 
> oh, and the title is from _lullaby_ by the dixie chicks, which i have recently discovered is the most patrick and david song to have ever been written. of course, the lyrics at the end are from _the nearness of you_ by norah jones.


End file.
